So what's the prison population in each state?
Well, we're going WAY off-topic here, and that's my fault. Sorry.
But, since you brought it up... is that really the question to ask?
WI has only 85% of the population that WA has, but spends 124% of what WA spends on its prisons. Put another way, if we scale down WA's population to the size of WI, WA would proportionally only be spending $756 million on its prisons, compared to the $1.1 billion WI spends at that population level.
So, are we to infer that WI has 1.45 persons in prison for every person in a WA prison? If that's the case, poor fiscal policy is far from Wisconsin's only problem.
Having said all that, I decided to get some actual numbers and along the way, I discovered some interesting stuff that I will present without comment, since I think it speaks for itself:
State’s big prison population drop called ‘historic’
According to that not-too-badly outdated information, WI's prison population is approximately 20,000. During roughly the same time period - January 2011 -
WA's prison population was about 16,000.
So, WI has only 85% of the population, but has 125% as many prisoners. (And we haven't had an epic wave of prisoner releases like in WI, either. Prior to releasing 3000, as outlined in the news story, it was
143%.)
So, I ask again... what the hell is wrong with Wisconsin? Why so many people in prison?
OK, I'm letting this drop and I apologize again for straying so far from e-cigarette subject matter. It's just that Blue State public policy is a pet peeve of mine, and Wisconsin is one of the poster children for government ridiculousness.
Rant
